For the Angrezi Mein Weak – Quondam means “Belonging to some prior time”. It’s pronounced as you commonly know it.I was browsing across the web ( what’s new?), and came across these connecting protocols of the yester years.I knew of them before itself, but did not know that they still existed.

Gopher:- It’s a searchable, information directory that was created in 1991 at Minnesota.For the history and technical details read GopherThis was popular till about 1994 . That’s when the WWW took over, owing to the rich interface and easy to use addresses. However Gopher enthusiasts, mainly in the academic and military community still continue to support and run this on many servers. The best part is since it is UNIX/Linux based,Mozilla and hence FIREFOX still support it. The addresses are like gopher://something. IE7 officially stopped recognizing the gopher protocol. The search engine for Gopher is VERONICA( a funny acronymn, check it out).Currently only one server for this exists. A site named floodgate maintains the list of servers supporting gopher currently. There is suppposedly one in INDIA , (will have to check that out).

TELNET:-This is a communications protocol created in 1969.For history and tech-details read TELNET. Largely UNIX based, considered very prone to security attacks, Used for Handshake protocols also. The Bulletin Board Systems of the 80’s were also based on TELNET. Currently very uncommon. Almost extensively replaced by SSH, (also on UNIX).Have you heard of a ftp client called “Putty”?. It supports SSH as well as telnet.Windows still has it inbuilt.

These guys are looked upon as some kind of lit gods in our college. I mean, do they really deserve that much attention.For one – what they publish is not NEWS!. It is just a cynical view of something that has happened around 1 month back.For once , can they have a serious outlook about something!.Case in point:- Investigative journalism done by “The Harvard Crimson” in the issue of Kavya Vishwanathan.We know the events that followed.Can these guys do something like that? A long way to go, I think.The “standards” that they have set upon themselves is really low and the unfortunate point is the junta seems to like it( There’s no choice anyway ). It’ll be a difficult task to “uplift” the minds. But heck, the problem is no one is giving a try.I remember asking Subbu ( Ubbus! , whatever) in the first year (First year enthu), about the nature of the college “newspaper”, he refused to comment !.

P.S.:- I have ” ” many times. Sorry for that.This article is inspired by a blogpost from Hasan about the same issue. I got the courage/stir to write this from his article.Thanks a Million!